As communications and computer technology advances, most people would agree that the information age has arrived. Some may bask in the ability to access, track, and view vast amounts of information quickly. Yet, others may feel lost in such a sea of information.
In the course of a computing day, a computer user can easily become deluged and swamped with information. The computer user performs many actions associated with important information such as sending electronic mail, creating new documents, updating documents, making appointments, and making and taking telephone calls. Traditionally, the user has had to manually write details regarding such important information into a bound journal or a separate electronic document.
In an effort to organize all of this information, personal information manager programs have attempted to provide an electronic tool for scheduling, electronic mail management, task management ("to-do" lists), and contact management. Information has become better organized with personal information manager programs, but deciphering what information to deal with, tracking and analyzing information associated with actions from inside as well as from outside the program, and determining how to use such information can still be problematic.
People using information management tools want to keep track of only actions that are important and view those important actions in a way that is useful. However, existing information management tools apparently lack a provision to allow user selectivity of which actions are important enough to be tracked. Furthermore, there is apparently no capability for recording information related to important actions associated with either a program module internal to the information management tool or a program module external to the information management tool.
Therefore, there is a need for a system for selectively recording a data structure associated only with important actions. There is also a need to record a data structure associated with an action by either an internal program module or an external program module. Furthermore, there is a need for viewing a representation of a data structure in combination with representations of other previously recorded data structures whereby the data structure can be viewed on the display provided by the user interface in relation to when the other previously recorded data structures were recorded in memory.